


Remediation

by Megpie71



Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Comparisons of VR vs actual reality, Dissociation, Gen, Mentally Ill Character, Not canon-typical levels of gore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-04
Updated: 2018-05-04
Packaged: 2019-05-02 00:59:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,123
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14533239
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Megpie71/pseuds/Megpie71
Summary: A perspective on the first few minutes of the original game, given the context fromCrisis Core- why does the mission feel so unreal, when he can remember having done this before?





	1. Remediation

**Author's Note:**

> As should be reasonably apparent, I am not the Square Enix corporation of Japan, and I therefore do not own the copyright on the intellectual property of Final Fantasy VII, or the characters of Cloud Strife and Barret Wallace. I contend that my use of the characters, locations, themes and concepts from these intellectual properties is within the bounds of fair use as determined by US law.
> 
> No money is being sought for or made from this work.

_Is this the real life; is this just fantasy?_   
_(“Bohemian Rhapsody”, Queen)_

It didn't seem real. 

He'd been here before. He could remember a mission. Wutai troops on a train, disguised as Shinra troopers. He could remember the feeling of motion, the sound of the train rushing over the rails, the pressure of the air in his face threatening to knock him off balance. That was all there. But... there was more this time.

Textures. The feel of the mako-tainted soot on the roof of the carriage, where he was laying, head-down, the rough metal, the discomfort and stickiness of it all. Smells, too - smells he couldn't remember from the last time this happened. It all added to the sense of unreality. 

There were other people here. If he’d lifted his head, he could have seen them. The big black guy who was in charge; the girl with the bombs; the fat guy; the skinny guy with the mouth on him. Which wasn't right, was it? Back then, the mission had just been him. 

There was a low tunnel - "heads down!" yelled the big guy as they came up to it - and he remembered this. Didn't remember flattening himself on the roof of the train, though. He remembered flying through the space above it. If he'd tried to do that today, he'd have splattered himself across one of the billboards advertising the latest performance of _Loveless_. Maybe it had been a dream. 

Maybe this was a dream. The noise, buffeting his head, bludgeoning his brain. The smells – garbage, rotting food, rotting meat, things breaking down and decomposing, rusting metal. The combination of the rough inner texture of his gloves, and the pitted metal he could feel through them, the roof of the train. He remembered the metal of the train roof had been smooth. 

The train was slowing, pulling into the station. The smells were changing - the reek of mako fumes from the nearby reactor; oil and grease from the railbed; and from the entertainment district not far away, the twin smells of alcohol and fried food. His stomach twisted. 

A moment of silence, as the train finally came to a complete halt. The two guards for the station walked along the row of carriages, looking the cars over, opening the doors to release the passengers. 

"We wait on the roof until the passengers have left", the big guy had said. "Then, we knock out the guards and make our way to the reactor gate."

He watches as the crowd heads down along the station, toward the stairs to the entertainment district in Sector Eight. Nobody lingers. The last stragglers are gone. Time to make their move.

The skinny guy and the girl with the bombs drop down and knock out the guards. Part of him recognises their moves - clumsy, second-hand. The girl's kick leaves her shaking out her ankle; poor technique. Sloppy, unprofessional. But the guards are knocked out, and the fat guy and the black guy jump down, the black guy gesturing to him to follow.

He jumps down, landing in a low crouch - a move made necessary by the weight of the sword on his back. There’s another thing which feels unreal about this whole situation. The sword doesn't feel right - too big, too heavy, too clumsy. It forces him to crouch lower, stand with a wider stance, to be able to balance the weight of the thing through the forms of combat. 

"C'mon, newcomer! Follow me," the black guy tells him, as the four of them run off toward the end of the platform. He follows more slowly, fragments of memory insisting the mission isn't over with the defeat of the platform guards. He stops and frisks the first guard, removing the potion he knows (how does he know?) they carry. 

He's about half-way down the platform when the other shoe drops. A pair of Shinra military police, so similar in appearance to the figures in his memory. Only two of them... surely there should be more? They spot the knocked-out station guards, and see him, start running toward him, and this is all familiar, this he knows, this he remembers. He pulls the sword from its magnetic harness on his back, and gets into position. 

The MPs pause for a second on seeing him, like they aren't expecting him to attack them. Like they're expecting him to be another Shinra dog, just like them. But he's not a Shinra dog any more. Not now. Not after...

He doesn't remember why he's not with Shinra. 

It distracts him, lets the MPs get a couple of strikes in, and he can feel the impact of the baton, the shock of the rubber bullets they use. He strikes back...

It feels wrong - the weight and momentum of the blade, the resistance of it hacking through flesh and bone, it all feels wrong. The smells - the metallic smell of blood, and the meaty smell of flesh, entrails, all the things which make up a human. A flash of memory - or nightmare - someone wrist-deep in his own entrails, and he gags for a second, distracted enough not to dodge the second volley from the MP still standing. The bullets sting, and he strikes again, and feels once more the unfamiliar resistance, the feeling of the weight of the blade doing all the work of dismembering a human being, the spray of blood. Then it's over. He's crouched there, sword at ready, with four pieces of Shinra military policeman scattered around him. It took seconds. 

The twirl as he re-holsters the sword is unconscious. The bodies lie there on the pavement, rapidly-cooling hunks of meat, blood pooling out onto the concrete of the station concourse. The metallic smell of blood envelops him, makes him wrinkle his nose in distaste. Best not to be around when the guards come to, he remembers. He does a quick rummage through the pockets of the corpses, nets another potion, and a few gil. He takes the potion from the second of the train guards before he heads up the stairs, looking for the people he arrived with. 

He spots them on the concourse, wonders how the MPs managed to miss them. The girl is crouched before the lock, brow furrowed in concentration. The plump guy is watching out, his head turning constantly from side to side. It's an inefficient way of maintaining surveillance. 

The skinny guy looks up as he arrives. 

"Wow," he says. "You used to be in SOLDIER, huh? Not every day you find one in a group like AVALANCHE."

The woman looks up from her work on the lock. "SOLDIER? Aren't they the enemy?" she asks. "What's he doing with us in AVALANCHE?"

The skinny guy rolls his eyes. "He was in SOLDIER, Jessie. But he quit, and he's with us now." 

The guy looks over at him. "I didn't catch your name..."

For a moment, he blanks. His name? What is his name? Jumbled recollections of labels, glimpses of initials; S, Z... C...

"Cloud," he says. 

The guy grins. "Cloud, eh? I'm -"

"I don't care what your names are," Cloud says. "Once this job's over... I'm outta here."

The moment is broken by the entry of the big black man, a gun clipped to the lower part of his right arm, in place of the prosthetic which used to be there. He frowns at all of them. 

"The hell you all doin'!?" he expostulates. "I thought I told you never to move in a group!?" The black guy glares at them. The plump guy looks shamefaced, the skinny guy looks mulish. 

"Our target's the North Mako Reactor," the black guy tells them once again. "We'll meet on the bridge in front of it." 

There's a beep from the lock Jessie has been working on; the gate slides open. The three slum rats run into the forecourt, scattering as they go. Cloud is left at the gateway, facing the black guy.

"Ex-SOLDIER, huh?", the black guy - Barret, Cloud suddenly remembers; his name is Barret - says. "I don't trust ya!"

Cloud shrugs, and watches Barret follow his troops. Cloud looks up at the bulk of the reactor cooling tower, looming over the forecourt. 

He follows Barret in. 

_Caught in a landslide; no escape from reality_   
_(“Bohemian Rhapsody”, Queen)._


	2. Copious Author's Notes

This story was written as a piece of assessment work for one of the units I’m studying at university (I love my degree), where we were required to perform a remediation of a media text. Now, for those who don’t have a media and cultural studies background, in this context, “remediation” means the transformation of a piece of media from one format to another, where the content is altered in some way due to the different mediums being used. To give a fandom-relevant (and story-relevant) example: the intertextual linking of Zack Fair’s first mission in _Crisis Core_ to the first mission in _Final Fantasy VII_ is not a remediation, because they both take place in video games – the same medium. If, instead, Square Enix had given game purchasers an eight-page comic book detailing this first mission, as a supplement to the _Crisis Core_ game, that would have counted as a remediation (interactive audio-visual medium to textual medium). In the same way, my picking this specific sequence of the games to turn into a textual fanfiction is a remediation as well as a partial re-imagining of the scene. (The partial re-imagining is necessary because I’m changing the perspective from third person omniscient, as per the games, to first person).

Further fuel to the creative fire for me came from the realisation that Cloud Strife, in _Final Fantasy VII_ , winds up spending a lot of time as an effective human remediation of Zack Fair – he’s working off Zack’s memories, and for a great deal of the game, he thinks he is Zack. He’s also a partial remediation of Sephiroth (he was intended by Hojo to be a replica, or clone[1], of Sephiroth). Which means the whole thing works very nicely as a bit of intertextuality on that level as well, which amuses me as the author.

The readings provided on remediation (by Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin; _"Configurations"_ Volume 4, Number 3, Fall 1996, pp 311 - 358) pointed to virtual reality as a form of remediation which gave a certain level of hyper-reality. Given Zack’s first “mission” in _Crisis Core_ occurs in the VR training area, I thought it would be interesting as an author to contrast the two experiences – Zack’s VR experience, and Cloud’s ‘real world’ one – in the context of this hyper-reality. One of the things about hyper-reality as humans is we tend to experience it as being unrealistic – and I thought there would be a layer of this in Cloud’s experience. Cloud is comparing the ‘real’ experience to the ‘hyper-real’ experience he’s inherited through Zack’s memories, and as a result the ‘real’ experience, with its added sensory information (smell, texture, tastes, etc) comes across as hyper-hyper-real, and adds to his sense of disorientation and dissociation.

I would like to offer acknowledgement here of the wonderful work of Feather (lalaietha) in her series [“Your Blue-Eyed Boys”](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1690700/chapters/3595874) (MCU, Captain America: The Winter Soldier fandom; link goes to the effective "start" of the story), which offered me some insight into the psychological process of dissociation and the way it feels from the inside. I’ve incorporated this knowledge into my work, but she does it much better than I do, and at far greater length. I really recommend her work to anyone who wants to have some insight into the ways (extremely) complex PTSD can be depicted in a literary fashion.

Finally: It should be obvious I’m not the Square Enix corporation. I therefore do not own copyright to Final Fantasy VII, Cloud Strife, Zack Fair, or any of the other characters depicted here; those rights remain entirely with the Square Enix corporation and the individuals who created these characters. This work is a work of fan-fiction, made of a deep-seated and abiding love for the game, its story and its characters, and no money is being charged, made, or asked for the creation of this work. As fanfiction, this work is covered under the “fair use” provisions of US copyright law, and hosted in the USA.

 

[1] I really think there was a translation issue here – in English, “clone” tends to have the colloquial meaning of “genetically identical double”, while it’s clear in the _Final Fantasy VII_ continuity that Sephiroth’s so-called “clones” in _Advent Children_ are separate individuals with different personalities, despite their overall physical resemblance to Sephiroth. The word “replica” (where the English-language connotation is “we have recreated the original in an updated version”) seems a better fit.


End file.
